UK Agonizes Over 'Disastrous' £5.5-B Army Ajax Tank Program

Ajax was meant to be the Army's first new armored vehicle in a generation, designed to make the military more deadly on the battlefield.

Photo Insert: Soldiers who tested the Ajax complained about the noise and vibration that prevented them from firing the guns and machine guns.

A massive £5.5billion was set aside for the project - but it has been a disaster plagued with glitches, with prototypes damaging the hearing of troops who tested them and making other personnel sick, Tom Cotterill reported for Mailonline.

Now, with £3.2 billion of taxpayers' cash pumped into the scheme - which has failed to put a single one of the promised 589 tanks into service - fresh question marks are swirling over whether it is time for Ajax to be axed.

It comes as the new Chancellor Jeremy Hunt warned “there will be more difficult decisions to be made on both tax and spending” after his predecessor Kwasi Kwarteng's disastrous mini-budget last month caused financial chaos and led to the pound plummeting in value.

The comments have fueled fresh fears that cuts could be looming within the Ministry of Defense (MoD) to fill a £60 billion black hole in government finances.

The Ajax program has been delayed by at least five years and faces languishing in defense procurement purgatory while engineers attempt to make the vehicles safe.

The US contractor for Ajax, General Dynamics, complained to The Telegraph on Oct. 17, 2022 that the original plan was for lighter and more maneuverable Ajax to replace Scimitar, a hulking British infantry fighting vehicle (IFV) but the company said the MoD called for 1,200 changes to the design, adding armor and pushing the light APC to become a 38-ton behemoth armed with a bigger gun and additional technology not contemplated in the original contract.

Soldiers who tested the Ajax complained about the noise and vibration that prevented them from firing the guns and machine guns.

General Dynamics was chosen to provide 589 armored vehicles to the British Army. Ajax is the company’s biggest project and the UK government is its biggest client. In 2018, the company reported a total operating profit of £89.1 million from a turnover of £736 million — of which £509 million was revenue directly generated by Ajax.

The accounts for that year were signed by another former senior Army officer, Lieutenant General Andrew Figgures. He became a director of General Dynamics (UK) after retiring from the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers.

Ajax’s problems can be traced to the Army’s insistence on having the company’s armored vehicle rather than BAe’s CV90.

The CV90 has been introduced into service with armies across the world. A source told the Mail the MoD wanted to punish BAE for the failure of the MRA4 Nimrod program — the ministry ordered 21 maritime reconnaissance and attack aircraft from BAe but after delays and hitches the program was scrapped with losses exceeding £4 billion.

“Anyone but Bae,” was the mantra. And when the choice of Ajax was challenged by the MoD’s procurement scrutiny committee, the Army “blustered it through,” according to sources.

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